


Before The Yellow Wallpaper

by salable_mystic



Category: The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Genre: Gen, Haunted Houses, Maybe - Freeform, Period Typical Attitudes, Pre-Canon, Prequel, Spooky, period typical incorrect assessment of mental illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:47:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27458236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salable_mystic/pseuds/salable_mystic
Summary: The colonial mansion is dilapidated, sure - but also a good place to spend the summer, if one needs to get away from it all.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 26
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Before The Yellow Wallpaper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



> Dear Havisham, you mentioned that you wanted to know the backstory of the people who encountered the wallpaper before. Here's one thing that might (or might not) have happened in that house ... .

Right from the start, even after the family had just moved into the house, the children loved the wallpaper.

They were a little old to be staying in the nursery, perhaps, but that is how the previous tenants of the house had used the room, and, besides the swirly yellow wallpaper, the children liked that the room was at the very top of the stairs and that they could see out onto the garden from it, the highest place in the house.

Their parents easily acquiesced – for they were unruly children, and their parents weren’t much used to taking care of them – and simply replaced the cradle and the rest of the nursery equipment with beds better suited to the age of the children. They also discussed having the wallpaper replaced – for it was in a somewhat deplorable state already, as were some other parts of the house, besides being of a bilious yellow – but the children had fallen in love with it, and so, since they were only renting the place for the summer, or until their fortunes turned around, whichever came first – they decided to leave it in place.

The mansion had – given its size, as well as the size of its garden – come surprisingly cheap to rent, and seemed like a stroke of good fortune for a family that had unexpectedly fallen on hard times.

What did it matter, then, that some of the greenhouses had fallen into disrepair, that the garden was overgrown, and that the roof let in the rain in some of the upper story rooms? There was more than enough space and rooms left dry to live quite comfortably – plus the fact that the house was set back from the road and at quite a distance from the nearest village made the chance of visitors or observers less likely – and privacy was something the family quite desired, at a time such as this.

For, while certainly no-one was to blame for the hard times that had beset them, and that it was simply a fact of life that being in the shipping business meant that investments in ships and shipped goods always carried the risk of something going wrong – but when it turned out that calamity had struck the sailing vessel that was carrying, as its cargo, all the rich spices that the husband had invested in in the hopes of turning their declining situation around, they had been inconsolable. And, rather than risk the ridicule – or worse, pity – of their friends and associates, they had hastily decided to hide their misfortune behind a summer retreat. Lending out their stately home in town to an upstart family putting on airs was as unpleasant as it was well-remunerated, and, having come to know of this spacious, if somewhat ramshackle, colonial mansion almost as soon as they started hatching the plan, it seemed as if this step was fated to be.

For the first week of their habitation, things went well enough. Certainly, the children struggled with being away from the city and all of their friends and ran roughshod all through the house, and the fact that the family had also been forced to let go of the children’s nurse and tutor meant that the task of looking after them now fell to adults entirely unaccustomed to the task, but, on the whole, they were dealing well enough. Plus, the weather was sunny and so the children could spend a vast majority of their time outside, only visiting the house when they were hungry or looking for succor for a scraped knee, and by the evening this continuous exercise had tired them out so much that they fell into their makeshift beds in the former nursery and almost instantly went to sleep. They were city children, after all, accustomed to busy roads and to behaving well in the manicured parks that the nurse and mother took them to, so being able to run wild among the overgrown hedges and untended gardens was a new experience for them, and helped to quell their restless tendencies.

So it was only when the weather turned to the worse that the trouble began. The warm and pleasantly sunny weather turned into an unseasonably cold and rainy summer, and the mother – for fear that the children would catch cold and further upset the already unsettled fortunes of the family – decided to keep them inside exclusively. But she was given to melancholic spells, during which she was not able to tolerate a great deal of excitement, and the father, knowing his risky financial ventures had greatly troubled his wife, compensated for her uncertain temperament by instituting strict rules. The children were to stay out of sight during the day – at liberty to run wild through the house, for it was in enough of a state of general dilapidation that some more scratches in the furniture or dings in the hardwood floor would surely go unnoticed by the absentee landlords – but they were to not bother their mother while she gathered back her strength.

Initially, both adults were pleased with this arrangement. They interacted with their children at mealtimes, but not to such a degree that it meant the children interfering with their accustomed togetherness or time spent in solitary pursuits, and the children showed they were doing well by being cheerful at mealtimes – and by the occasional bang or crash that resounded throughout the house – a bang or crash that was never followed up by crying or screaming, and so was never a cause for concern. Though, the mother noticed, even those bangs and crashes decreased in frequency as the days progressed, one rainy day merging into the next, introducing a slowly creeping gloominess into the house that seemed to also fall on the children, for they were less raucous and quieter during dinnertime, too.

They were spending more time in their room upstairs, in the old nursery, where they only used to sleep during the sunnier days, the father noticed – though what they could be getting up to up there he really had no idea and was, in all honesty, little concerned about, for the room hardly contained anything except their makeshift sleeping arrangements – and, of course, the odious wallpaper. And indeed, it seemed to be the wallpaper that kept them in their room, incomprehensible as that appeared to him. For, when he inquired what they had been doing during a particularly silent day, one evening over dinner, his eldest hardly looked up from the meal the mother had had to prepare with her own hands (a point he would not let the children soon forget), only reporting that “They had been learning to understand the wallpaper.”

What that meant, he had no idea. He meant to inquire, but then his wife said something about the uncomfortable state of the south-facing parlor, and the conversation moved on. Still, children were always incomprehensible and strange, and this seemed like a harmless fancy to have – even if he shuddered a little, meeting their gazes as they excused themselves from their half-eaten meals – and then scolded himself, for imagining a feral glint in their eyes. The long-untended mansion and the gloomy weather; the flickering of the candle in the inevitable draft, all of that had him imagining things, that was all. Still, he resolved to spend even more time in his study, perusing the papers for business opportunities, for the sooner they all returned to their accustomed life in the city, the better.

Still, the thought would not leave him alone. One night, once it was late and after his wife had gone to sleep – or so he presumed, as they had decided to have separate bedrooms during their stay, for the house certainly afforded them the space – he made his way up to the attic room that the children had selected for their own. He opened the door slowly, carefully, and tried his best not to disturb them at their rest. He’d dimmed his light, so it was barely enough to illuminate the space – but definitely bright enough to reassure him, and to make him shake his head at his own fancy. The children were fine, and it had indeed been the flickering light in the dining room that had had made imagine things. Yes, certainly, it might seem a little strange that their room was still as empty as it had been on their first day here – the children had brought none of their play-things into it, having apparently decided that the room was for sleeping only, as it held nothing except their bed-steads. And, well, he would not have chosen to arrange to sleep in the fashion that they had decided upon, but who knew what logic or fancy ruled the minds of children? If they wanted to sleep pressed up to the wall, their faces each turned towards the wallpaper, so that their foreheads seemed to touch the swirling ugly lines of the dilapidating print, that was their business. For all that it seemed strange to him, it apparently suited them well enough, for the room was silent except for their calm and even breathing.

Not a little annoyed with himself for having entertained such foolish concerns in the first place, he backed out of the room and made his way to his own chamber, resolved to not let the house and the uncertain times prey on his mind any longer.

-&-

As the days progressed without an improvement in the weather, being confined to the house intensified the already predominant tendencies in all its inhabitants to excess. The husband spent more and more time in his salon, in increasingly desperate study of what newspapers were to be had in the countryside, writing progressively more and more outrageous business proposals to more and more distant acquaintances. The wife’s always uncertain mental state swung between increasing extremes, leading her into deeper and deeper fits of desolation, which less and less often were balanced out by spurts of cheerfulness and cordiality. During these, she resolved to spend more time with the children, but grew increasingly puzzled by their strange game of endlessly tracing the whorls of the wallpaper and then repeating the turns in the pattern to each other, until one of them made a mistake and they were forced to start over again. She even tried to join in, once or twice – but they were so far along in their complex repetitions that she had no hope of catching up to them, and while they showed patience for her stumbling attempts, she never could get over the feeling that they were secretly resenting her presence in what they considered to be their own, private space.

Still, the children seemed contented enough to her, and, given that she, too, had little experience in caring for children herself – a job usually left to their tutor and nanny – even during her cheerful periods she was happy to let them indulge their childish fancies and games in peace, and left them to themselves in the attic. During her fits of desolation, thoughts of the children hardly even entered her mind.

As to the children, they continued their progress in the attic.

-&-

The family might have continued on like this indeterminately, if not for the coincidence of two unrelated circumstances, both of which ostensibly seemed to bring an improvement to the family fortune.

On the one hand, the weather brightened considerably, after weeks of rain, thus opening the possibility of outside pursuits to restless spirits. And, on the other hand, the husband got word from a remote acquaintance that the chance of a possibility of a hefty profit was to be had, if one were willing to stake a substantial amount of money on the cargo of a trade ship headed out to the East Indies. He immediately perceived both the size of the potential reward, as well as the inherent risk in this proposal – but, given that he saw no other way of turning their financial, social, and familial fortunes around, he was willing to stake what remained of their circumstances on this venture. Still, though he considered matters of business to be his domain alone, the money that remained to them was money left from the dowry that is wife had brought into the marriage with her, and so he considered it his duty to inform her of his resolve to risk it all on the investment.

The children were surely not to be concerned with such matters, but given the serious nature of the information he was to present to his wife, and uncertain as to the mood he was to find her in, he decided to make sure that the children would not interrupt their conversation. The chance of this happening seemed low, in any case – now that he really pondered the matter, he had hardly seen the children outside of mealtimes in weeks, and even at those, their presence had become irregular. While children not being seen or heard was, in itself, surely to be commended, absence from mealtimes spoke of a lack of discipline and respect, and was behavior that was not to be left to slide. A firm talking to and a day spent outside was certain to benefit the children.

Thus resolved, he headed up the staircase to the attic, certain that he would find the children in their play- and bedroom. The closer he got to the top of the stairs, the more oppressive the air seemed to him – which was a strange fancy indeed, he immediately berated himself, for he could hear the birds chirping from outside, and the house had seemed light and airy to him just minutes earlier, in all its dilapidated state, as if it too was taking a breath of fresh air now that sunny summer had returned. Still, he could not shake the feeling of unease, and it only increased after he made it to the attic landing. The children were in their room, that, at least, became immediately apparent, for he could easily make out their voices through the door, though he could make little sense of the words they seemed to be chanting. It sounded like they were calling out directions – but directions to where, and meant for whom? Each other?

Frowning, he pushed the handle of the door and made to open it – but it resisted the movement, only giving a little. There was no lock from the inside, he had made sure of that before letting the children claim the room; nor did it seem to be locked, but it definitely did not give easily. Had the children pushed a bed behind it? That seemed the only explanation – but why would they do such a thing? It was not as if either of their parents intruded into their lives … .

Whatever the cause or the reason, such behavior was not to pass. The father’s frown deepened, and he leaned his weight against the door, shoving with all his not inconsiderable strength. Whatever had been obscuring the door gave easily, and he stumbled into the room.

Whether he tripped, fell, and hit his head on the floor because he stumbled over the bedding that had indeed been pushed behind the door, or because of the shock that came from beholding his children – thin bodies, feral eyes, no sign of recognition in their empty faces as they screamed maniacally at the appearance of a stranger in their midst, he was never able to say. Indeed, it might even have been because, seconds before consciousness left him, he beheld the outline of a woman moving behind the wallpaper, her hypnotic gaze focused entirely on him, and her face full of wild, unrestrained, savage joy.

Whatever the case, the children all later would uniformly state that they had been innocently playing games in their room, when their father rushed in, stumbled, fell, got up again, and, without pausing to look at or acknowledge them, ran through the room and jumped out of the attic window.

-&-

The officers tasked with investigating the case found this strange, but not entirely improbable – after all, it soon became known that the family was in severe financial straits, and the father’s acquaintances told tales of countless letters proposing increasingly desperate investment ventures. Added to that the fact the marriage did not seem to be a happy one – for the husband was uniformly reported to have been somewhat unfeeling and cold – it surely seemed reason enough. And, after all, both the nurse and the tutor, when thus questioned, attested that the children were perfectly well behaved and friendly ones.

Indeed, thus the officers too found them to be, once they encountered them in the modest townhouse that a friend of the family had moved them to from their so ill-fated sojourn in the countryside.

Thus, while the officers were not entirely happy with the lack of any concrete evidence of any sort in the case, they were convinced enough and closed the case – men are known to do strange things in times of strain, after all.

Nevertheless, to satisfy the cold shiver that a close investigation of the attic room caused to run down their spine, as well as the feeling of having let something pass that should not have been allowed to do so, they ordered bars to be put on the attic window. Too late in this specific instance, of course – but then, the house was being rented out to tenants regularly – and, given that the room was originally meant to be a nursery, having bars in front of the window would only ensure the safety of all its future occupants, no matter their age.

The children, even years later, would not speak of that summer at all, and always got the most eerie and empty expression in their eyes at even a passing mention of it, or of their father. The mother, too, could not remember or would not speak of that time. But then, given her melancholy temperament and their so tragic loss of their father – it must surely excuse the fact that they collectively preferred to never speak of that summer. For all that theirs was so tragic a loss, they rallied well, as all their acquaintances will attest. The smiles on the face of the mother seemed to come easier and more often, and the children continued to do well at their studies.

-&-

The house, not unexpectedly, stood empty for the rest of that year. But then – it is a most charming place only in the summer.


End file.
